Accidents of Influence: Writing as a Woman and a Jew in America

FOREWORD

FOREWORD Though I began to publish fiction in 1959, it was not until 1973 that I risked my first foray into direct statement, unprotected by masks of fictional characters and voices. I have left these essays and short pieces as they originally appeared except for changes to omit duplications of reference or to clarify the intention of the writing, but without bringing them up to date with books or opinions that arrived at a later time. And without, also, mitigating extravagances of younger days. Did I really want, as in one despairing essay of twenty years ago, to compare the medieval blood libel against Jews with Orthodox judaism's barring and isolating of women from ritual observance? I might not use such language now, but feel no better disposed toward either ancient insult carried forward to a presumed modernity. Sometimes I'm as moved to rail against modernity for truckling to transience as against orthodoxies for intransigence . In 1976 I wrote about a collection of letters of an assimilated German half-Jew, Peter Schwiefert, who, in the hell of the Holocaust era in which he perished, resolved the wholeness of his identity. This remarkable act of reclamation of a lost work of poetry and truth was accomplished by its editor, the then-unknown-toAmerica Claude Lanzmann. A decade later, Shoah, Lanzmann's film documentary of surviving Holocaust victims, their tormentors , and their witnesses, burst upon our consciousness. Never have I seen the works linked, but I believe these two categories of the murdered-the lonely, fleeing individual and the abandoned, enslaved multitude-belong together. Leaving the essays more or less as they are makes it possible to keep faith with the journey of discovery that nonfiction writing can be. In that sense, many of the essays make up a memoir as well, an account of persons, places and ideas visited and lived with in the IX x FOREWORD mind. This memoir-journey has taken me through examinations of my role as a post-Holocaust writer, a woman, and a Jew in AmerICa . Some of the essays collected here surprise me with their heaped-up wrath. 1think of myself as peaceable. A way to account to myself for this tone is by acknowledging that 1 have what has come to be called (not often with approval) a Holocaust mentality. And so, for example, I have dealt with Norman Mailer's penchant for turning his own idealism into some messianic worldview of the moment, this time one achieved at the expense of Jews, whom he libels as too Holocaust-poisoned to join the visionary company. The view that shapes this epithet, Holocaust mentality, contends that though the Holocaust may be the central event of our time, there is something skewed, at best awkward, in allowing it to be one's mean-all and measure. When 1consider how various and beautiful life on its good days can be, 1 feel inclined to concur in this view myself, and want to add only that 1 would not have chosen such a way of responding if 1 could have avoided it. Others may have had an easier time of letting go of that mentality , at least in print. One of the essays here is called "Notes Toward a Holocaust Fiction." It speaks of writers who take "working vacations" from the Holocaust, and of the Nobel-prize-winning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, who writes of the need in creative life to let go of old selves and take on new ones so as not to remain "magnetized by the sight of evil perpetrated in our life-time ." For the Jewish writer, these words collide with the injunction : Zakhor. Remember. Following the publication of a series of my essays in the "Hers" column of the New York Times, an editor solicited information from me about interests and experiences that might lead to a nonfiction book. I startled myself and him by blurting, "I am married to a man whose parents were killed in the Holocaust." After a moment he replied politely that that, after all, was my husband's story to tell, not mine. 1 felt rebuked, a wife who puts on a husband's penumbra, a chameleon-female who takes on color from male concerns like the woman in Chekhov's "The Darling." If that jolt did not stop or shut me up it's because I've always known that my husband's story is his, in the eye of that annihilating storm, while mine...